JD and the Pope
What you need to know about JD Vance and the Vatican
This week I have a special treat for y’all: a guest post from Ashley Hildebrand. When JD Vance’s latest interaction with the Vatican made the news this week, the first person I thought of to give us the necessary context and analysis was Ashley. Thankfully, she was game.
-Melissa
Almost exactly one year ago, Pope Francis passed away… only a few hours after meeting with Vice President JD Vance, a vocal convert to Catholicism. And a few weeks later, Catholic Cardinals from around the world picked a Chicago-born pope whose most recent tweets included sharing articles criticizing Vance’s policy priorities.
The jokes nearly wrote themselves – “If JD Vance were a real Catholic, he’d die of guilt,” was my personal favorite, but there was no shortage of people calling out the fact that Vance had not one but two popes who knew who he was and thought he was wrong.
I’ve built my career tracking the influence of Catholicism on U.S. politics, so with the Catholic Church and Vance and the White House back in the news this week, I was thrilled that Melissa reached out to me. I believe that Vance’s conversion to Catholicism story is a common pattern in the United States: man wants power, sees the highly structured and patriarchal order of the Catholic Church, and leverages their pre-established base for his own political gain.
If you’re not familiar with the pattern, start with Paul Weyrich and his role in the Religious Right’s journey from segregation to anti-abortion advocacy. Weyrich helped shape this concept of Christian nationalism to replace democracy with a theocracy. It’s not often recognized that Weyrich – founder of the Heritage Foundation – was Catholic, not Evangelical, and viewed his work as a political fight rather than a religious one.
For its part, the institutional Catholic Church in the U.S. welcomed the support – and so began a trajectory that led us to where we are today. In 2010, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) pulled their support for the Affordable Care Act because of abortion, and when Catholic Sisters paved the way for its passage, the USCCB and the Vatican responded with a censure that accused Catholic Sisters of “radical feminism” and “being silent on the right to life from conception… a question that is part of the lively public debate about abortion.”
Pope Francis, elected in 2013, didn’t solve the US church’s “middle management problem.” While he was famously outspoken on issues like caring for the environment and lamented the Church’s singular focus on abortion at the expense of migrants and people in poverty, he didn’t change the environment that allowed people like JD Vance to rise to power. Less than two months before the 2024 election, Francis criticized both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, meddling by calling on Catholic voters to choose the “lesser evil” and saying, “both are against life, be it the one who kicks out migrants or be it the one who kills babies.” He failed to see the real threat posed by a Trump/Vance win and now we’re dealing with the consequences. And while I wouldn’t have expected him to endorse a candidate, he could have just said nothing!
And so, the USCCB continued to prioritize abortion. In 2021, The Catholic Bishops tried to deny communion to Catholic President Joe Biden over his support for abortion. In 2022, the Archbishop of San Francisco officially denied communion to then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. And after Roe v. Wade was overturned and states took up ballot measures to address abortion, the Catholic Church spent millions of dollars in Kansas, Ohio, Florida, and elsewhere (despite the fact that only 1 in 10 US Catholics agree with the official church teaching that abortion should be banned outright).
Knowing all this is plenty to leave me – a lifelong Catholic – feeling jaded about the U.S. church, no matter what a pope says. For as refreshing and beloved Pope Francis was (and I will always cherish one of his final jabs at Vance’s ordo amoris tweet), the final years of his papacy were a far cry from the early days where outlets were running “Who said it: Bernie Sanders or the Pope?” comparisons.
When Leo was selected it was major news – a U.S. pope! – but the general consensus was that he’d be someone who would stabilize the ship from the liberalness of Francis and would generally be a milquetoast bureaucratic pope pulling a little from the more traditional parts of Catholicism and a little from the playbook of Francis’ more liberal moments.
After nearly a year of Pope Leo, I think I feel somewhat hopeful that he will inspire people against the Trump/Vance philosophy. Here are just a few examples: Catholic Cardinals are speaking out about defunding ICE, Catholic news outlets are running opinion pieces saying Vance’s immigration comments are an insult to our faith, and even conservative Archbishops are leading prayers outside of immigrant detention centers. Pope Leo accepted the resignation of Trump’s pal on the Religious Liberty Commission, Cardinal Timothy Dolan. And the statements Pope Leo has made recently about the war in Iran are pointed and direct – you can’t get much clearer than “Jesus does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war.”
This week, The Free Press was first to report that back in January, the Trump/Vance White House threatened the Vatican and claimed that the U.S. can do “whatever it wants – and that the Church had better take its side.” It was so bad that it was the reason Pope Leo canceled any plans to visit the U.S., his home. The hubris of the White House shouldn’t be surprising, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t also acknowledge that it’s a continuation of the pattern of a man in U.S. politics telling the Catholic Church to get in line behind him. Historically, the church usually does, because it prioritizes alignment on abortion and traditional gender roles above everything else.
Pope Leo’s election gave the world another globally influential U.S. figure who could be a foil to Trump and by extension, Vance. From now to 2028, we’re unfortunately all stuck on this runaway train as one man (Trump) attempts to usurp democracy to remain in power, another (Vance) attempts a rise to power in his own right as heir-apparent, and a third (Pope Leo) balances the influence that he plays on the global stage as both American and leader of the Catholic Church.
It really boils down to this: JD Vance, like so many before him, uses the trappings of the church to prop up his own agenda rather than live out the fully rounded teachings 53 million Catholic Americans learned in Sunday School. A Trump/Vance presidency and the threats they pose to the future bring us closer to a Christian nationalism that Paul Weyrich dreamed of and our founding fathers warned against. It’s certainly surprising, though not unwelcome, that the leader of the Catholic Church might be the best chance we have to push back against their political crusade for power. I don’t know if the Pope can help us protect world peace or preserve American democracy – I know not to put all my trust in the institution of the church – but I hope he does.
Ashley (Wilson) Hildebrand is Vice President of Communications at Issue One. She has previously worked at NETWORK Lobby/Nuns on the Bus, the Friends Committee on National Legislation, and Catholics for Choice. Follow her on Twitter at @APdubs.
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Blatant Self-Promotion
Jeremy Bauer-Wolf interviewed me for New America’s Mythbusting Accreditation series. We talked about the Right’s attacks on higher education in the U.S. and the strategy behind it. (Yes, I managed to reference both Christopher Rufo and Curtis Yarvin.) You can read or watch here.
I believe in celebrating the wins, and today fascism took a resounding hit. In Hungary’s election, Orbán and his party lost spectacularly — and he’s already conceded to his opponent. The victorious party, Tisza, is projected to win 135 out of 199 seats in the legislature. As Woody Guthrie would say, “all you fascists bound to lose!”
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Missed this the first time, but Melissa's "Rage-Baiting the Pope" column gave me a second chance. I'd forgotten, or never registered in the first place, that Weyrich was Catholic, not Evangelical. From his Wikipedia entry, I see that after the Second Vatican Council, he left the Roman Church for the Melkite Greek Catholic Church -- John XXIII's reforms must have been too liberal for him?
That "highly structured and patriarchal order of the Catholic Church" also seems to have influenced the Federalist Society's picks for the U.S. Supreme Court, notably Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch (who was educated in Catholic schools but is now an Episcopalian), Kavanaugh, and Barrett. Thomas is also Catholic, but IIRC his big appeal to Bush I was that he was Black (he was succeeding the civil rights hero Thurgood Marshall) and against civil rights. Sonia Sotomayor is a different sort of Catholic for sure!
Anyway, thanks for this -- and keep talking!